POPE, JEWS ATTEMPTING TO SMOOTH RELATIONS

The historic discussions this month between Pope John Paul II and Jewish leaders are an attempt to overcome problems that for years have kept interfaith relations shifting between elation and outrage.

John Paul has praised Jews as "our elder brothers." But he also has talked about the "sin" of refusing Jesus.

After meeting with Jewish leaders in Rome earlier this week, the pope promised a major instructional letter on the Holocaust. The pope had been criticized for granting an audience to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, an accused Nazi perpetrator.

John Paul's statements and actions pose contradictions in Catholic beliefs that must be confronted, an interfaith scholar said.

"He might both desire a deepened, renewed relationship with the Jewish people and yet hold to a religious world view that makes no space for that new relationship," said Alan Mittleman, one of 196 Jewish leaders who will meet with the pope at the Dade Cultural Center in Miami on Friday.

"But in this business, the process itself is substantive," said Mittleman, a researcher for the American Jewish Committee. "The fact that the meetings occurred is itself important."

The papal audience in June with Waldheim, the catalyst for this week's meetings in Rome, revealed the differences in perceptions. To the pope, Waldheim was a fellow head of state. John Paul is head of the 108.7-acre Vatican City. To Jews, Waldheim was an unrepentant former Nazi being honored by a Christian leader.

It was only the latest in a string of events indicating "we still don't understand each other as much as we'd hoped," said Eugene Fisher, interreligious affairs secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference.

In 1982, John Paul welcomed Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Israel regards as a terrorist organization. Many Jews noted that the Vatican still does not recognize Israel as a state.

Jews also were uneasy this spring when the pope beatified Edith Stein, a Christianized Jew who died in the Holocaust. Her last will and testament includes a prayer "for the sins of the unbelieving Jewish people so the Lord will be accepted by His own."

John Paul's sympathy for Jewish sufferings is not mere pity or posturing. It is based on a living memory of the Nazi destruction.

As a young Pole, Karol Wojtyla helped obtain false identity papers for Jews, enabling them to escape Nazi-era Krakow. In 1979, the first time he returned to Poland after becoming Pope John Paul II, he laid flowers at the Auschwitz memorial. "This people," he said then, "draws its origin from Abraham, our father in faith," a clear linking of Jews and Christians.

A new 97-page book, John Paul II On Jews and Judaism, chronicles his addresses to Jews in every country he has visited. The book was co-sponsored by the U.S. Catholic Conference and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the largest Jewish fraternal organization in the world.

"Catholics should have not only respect but also great fraternal love (for Jews), for it is the teaching of both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures that the Jews are beloved of God, who has called them with an irrevocable calling," the pope said in Australia last November.

On April 13, 1986, when John Paul embraced Rabbi Elio Toaff at Rome's Grand Synagogue, he called Jews "our elder brothers."

But those warm words contradicted a Lenten sermon the previous February that called the Roman Catholic Church the "new Israel," more complete than Judaism. In the sermon, John Paul urged his listeners to "avoid the sin committed by the people of Israel who refused Jesus."

And today Jewish leaders say many Catholics remain unaware of the long history of Jewish persecution.

The Rev. Edward Flannery wrote in his landmark 1985 book The Anguish of the Jews: "Those pages of history that Jews have committed to memory are the very ones that have been torn from Christian history books."

As a result, some Jews do not believe the pope's words of the past week and plan to picket several stops on the papal tour, including the one in Miami. The protesters include the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center, which claims to have 250,000 names on a petition demanding recognition of Israel as a way to make up for the Waldheim audience.

Many Jewish leaders say they will believe the Vatican wants interfaith friendship only if it exchanges ambassadors with Israel. Typical of the hardliners is Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress: "You can't normalize relations with the Jewish world unless you normalize relations with the Jewish state."

But a Vatican source, who asked to remain anonymous, said: "Until there is peace in the area (of the Middle East), and a defined and recognized Palestinian homeland, the Vatican will not move to recognize the state of Israel."

Catholic church leaders also want "international guarantees" for access to holy sites in Israeli-occupied territories. And they worry about Christians in Islamic countries, which oppose any recognition of Israel until Palestinian Arabs are given a homeland. Those Christians include Maronites in Lebanon, Orthodox in Syria and Ethiopia, Copts in Egypt and Protestants in Indonesia.

"When Jordan held eastern Jerusalem for 19 years there was no murmur," said Michael Peled, Israel's attache to the Vatican. "Now it's united under Israel and people complain. Yet even the church admits that access to the holy sites -- Moslem as well as Christian -- has never been freer."

The lower-level contacts have worked for years, and some Jews argue that nothing more is needed.

" 'Diplomatic relations' has become a slogan," said Joseph Lichten, who was a Jewish observer during Vatican II in the mid-60s. "Every Jew would like to see it happen. But many, many other important things are happening."

Indeed, theologians are making progress in their quest for unity. Catholics are coming around to a theory of "convergence," in which Jews and Christians are carrying out some mysterious plan of God for humanity's redemption.

The theory would support the Vatican II assertion that the two religions share a unique relationship, said Fisher of the U.S. Catholic Conference. "As we read salvation history, Jesus being a Jew was not accidental; it was part of the plan. So when we talk to Jews we are discussing the one faith, the one God."

And while progress appears slow and erratic, interfaith leaders say most of it has happened in the span of a single generation.

"We've had 22 years of dialogue after 2,000 years of misunderstanding," Fisher said. "We are people of two ancient religions who need to deal with one another."

Rabbi James Rudin of The American Jewish Committee agrees. "Some Jews expect a quick fix to 1,900 years of suspicion and hostility. After Vatican II, some people were saying the church would never change its attitude. They were wrong. What appear to be small changes do make a big difference."